Did Zuckerberg himself support conspiracy theories? Or does he regret succumbing to government requests for censoring that type of content? Sounds to me like he wants to allow certain kinds of speech on his platform, regardless of whether or not he personally agrees with them.
He probably hates how expensive it was/is to now support government requests, and how many governments are big enough to bully "his" platform into giving the same support other governments have gotten.
Literally Zuckerberg is quoted as saying he didn't remove posts: "[USG] “expressed a lot of frustration” when the social media platform resisted.".
It would be much better if the article actually posted the contents of the government email. Everything we saw from say the Twitter files in this regard is some gov employee asking if X post complied with Y Twitter policy and if-not if the post should be removed. That gov employee didn't write Y policy, it was Twitter's own policy. I suspected a similar thing happened here where Facebook has a fake news policy [1] and a gov employee was asking them if given posts were in violation of it.
I assume he’s familiar with the transparency standards of his own site. And he still calls whatever happened pressure. So it’s entirely possible it wasn’t as innocuous as you suggest.
If a major government agency repeatedly requests you follow certain guidelines and gets frustrated when you don’t, it might be reasonable to feel pressured or threatened, even if they’re your own guidelines. I know I’d be, even by what was revealed in the Twitter files.
Their system is designed to push engagement. My guess is that COVID conspiracies generated this engagement, and their system automatically pushed it to the top. We already know that a lot of dishonest but emotionally charged speech gets pushed up by the algorithm.
IF COVID conspiracy theories got pushed up by this algorithm, as opposed to what would be produced by a 'dump pipe', then yes, with the power that Zuck has over facebook, he supported conspiracy theories, in the interest of making money.
